Electronic slide presentations are a common way to display information to one or more viewers. Slide presentation software (e.g. PowerPoint®) facilitates the creation of multimedia documents that may incorporate text, images, audio and/or visual clips for presentation in one or more slides. Often the documents are presented in a slideshow, displaying the slides sequentially. The slides may be displayed to a display screen of a computing device (e.g. personal computer or portable electronic devices) or remotely via a presentation device such as a projector for projecting the presentation to a remote screen.
When displayed on a portable electronic devices such as wireless mobile devices (cellular phones, PDAs, etc.) a viewer may be provided for displaying slide presentations in multiple display modes, such as a text mode for displaying text information distilled from the slides, a preview mode for displaying thumbnail slide images rendered from the slides, and a mixed mode for displaying both text information and thumbnail slide images together. The slide presentation viewer may also include a slide show mode for displaying the slide images in full screen along with an interface (e.g. menu) for selecting among the multiple modes and for invoking and controlling the slide show. For handheld wireless communication devices in particular, a network server may process slide presentation documents to generate the text information and slide images for communicating to wireless devices equipped with appropriate slide presentation viewers. The network server may be an attachment server for handling email attachments and the slide presentation viewers may be implemented as attachment viewers for email or as dedicated viewers for presentations.
Portable electronic devices may also be capable of remotely controlling display of an electronic slide presentation. For example, a presentation mode of operation may be provided for wirelessly controlling display of a slide presentation on a remote presentation device. When controlling a presentation in this fashion, the slides being displayed on the portable electronic device are the same as those displayed on the presentation device. Therefore, it is not possible to view other slides on the portable electronic device without exiting the presentation mode, which causes the presentation device to show a blank screen and thereby interrupt the flow of the presentation.